Consider yourself a copper miner in 3900 BCE in southeast Europe. You carry copper ore through the hot tunnels of the mine day after day.
You’ve accepted the hard routine of life in the mines. Then, one afternoon, you see a coworker accomplish something extraordinary.
His strange-looking device allows him to casually carry three times his body weight in one trip. You realize that your chosen career is about to become much less demanding and much more profitable as he heads back to the mine to get another load.
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What you’re not aware of is that you’re seeing something that will alter the path of history for everyone on Earth, not just your small mining hamlet.
Nobody knows for sure who invented the wheel or when or where it was initially imagined, despite its incalculable influence. The above-mentioned hypothetical situation is predicated on a 2015 notion that the wheel was initially created by miners in the Carpathian Mountains (present-day Hungary) over 6,000 years ago as a way to move copper ore.
Archaeologists in the area have found around 150 miniature wagons, which lends credence to the notion. These little, four-wheeled clay models had wickerwork patterns carved on their exteriors that resembled the basketry utilized by the mining communities of the day. These wagons are the earliest examples of wheeled transportation that have been discovered to date, according to carbon dating.
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As an aeronautical engineer who studies the science of engineering design, this hypothesis also poses an issue that particularly interests me. When highly developed civilizations like the ancient Egyptians did not discover the wheel, how did a small, scientifically uninformed mining society?
A contentious concept
It has long been believed that basic hardwood rollers gave rise to wheels. However, until recently, no one was able to explain how or why this change occurred. Furthermore, some experts began to voice serious concerns about the roller-to-wheel theory in the 1960s.
After all, rollers need a path devoid of steep slopes and sudden turns, as well as flat, firm terrain, in order to be effective. Additionally, in order to keep the cargo moving after the cart passes them, used rollers must be continuously moved around to the front of the line. The ancient world utilized rollers sparingly because of all these factors. The naysayers believed that rollers were too uncommon and unfeasible to have served as the initial catalyst for the development of the wheel.
Rollers, however, would have benefited from the contained, man-made tunnels of a mine. This and other factors forced my team to reexamine the roller theory.
A pivotal moment
Two significant breakthroughs are needed to make the switch from rollers to wheels. The first is an alteration to the cargo-carrying wagon. The semicircular sockets that keep the rollers in place must be installed on the base of the cart. In this manner, the rollers are drawn along with the cart as the operator pushes it.
The cramped conditions of the mine, where it would have been particularly difficult to take used rollers back around to the front of the cart on a regular basis, may have served as the impetus for this invention.
The second and most significant invention was made possible by the discovery of socketed rollers, which marked a sea change in the development of the wheel. The rollers themselves have to be modified in this subsequent step. We looked to physics and computer-aided engineering to learn how and why this transition happened.
Modeling the evolution of the wheel
We developed a computer program to mimic the transition from a roller to a wheel in order to start our inquiry. We hypothesized that a phenomenon known as “mechanical advantage” was responsible for this shift. By adding leverage, pliers can increase a user’s grip strength thanks to the same concept. In a similar vein, altering the roller’s form to produce mechanical advantage would increase the user’s pushing force and facilitate cart advancement.
Hundreds of possible roller shapes were modeled by our algorithm, which then assessed each one’s performance in terms of structural strength and mechanical advantage. The latter was used to assess if the weight of the cargo would cause a particular roller to break. The algorithm finally settled on the well-known wheel-and-axle shape, which it found to be ideal, as expected.
Every new design outperformed its predecessor by a small margin while the algorithm was being executed. We think that the miners underwent a comparable evolutionary process 6,000 years ago.
What first led the miners to experiment with different roller forms is unknown. One explanation is that the surrounding wood wore away due to friction at the roller-socket interface, which caused the roller to slightly narrow at the point of contact. Another explanation is that the miners started to thin out the rollers to allow their carts to go over minor terrain obstacles.
In any case, this shrinking of the axle region made pushing the carts easier because of mechanical advantage. Better-performing designs were consistently preferred over the others over time, and new rollers were created to imitate these high-performing models.
As a result, the rollers grew increasingly narrow until there was nothing left but a thin bar with big discs on either end. It was from this crude construction that what we now call “the wheel” was born.
Our hypothesis states that there was no exact time when the wheel was created. Instead, the wheel developed gradually from a series of minor advancements, much how organisms evolve.
The wheel has had a lengthy and continuous evolution, of which this is only one episode. The invention of radial ball bearings by a Parisian bicycle mechanic more than 5,000 years after the Carpathian miners’ contributions, completely changed wheeled transportation.
Ironically, the evolutionary forerunner of the wheel, rollers, and ball bearings are theoretically identical. By forming a ring around the axle, ball bearings prevent friction by establishing a rolling interface between the axle and the wheel hub. This invention brought the wheel’s evolution full circle.
This illustration also demonstrates how the wheel’s development, like its recognizable form, follows a convoluted course with no obvious start or finish and innumerable silent rotations.
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